CHAPTER 64
I hated to kill her.” Edmund House had resumed his seat atop the generator box, forearms resting on his thighs as if he were tending to a campfire and telling a ghost story. “But I knew I wasn’t going to get an opportunity to get rid of her body like that again. And I wasn’t going back to prison.”
He sat up straighter. Anger crept into his voice. “I should have been in the clear. I’d planned it perfectly, bringing her here. But then Calloway made up all that bullshit evidence and got everyone on board—Finn, Vance Clark, your father. Even my uncle turned against me. So I decided, if I was going to hell for the rest of my life, I was taking Calloway with me, and I told him exactly what I’d done to her.”
House grinned. “One big problem. He wasn’t recording it. Man, I knew that would piss him off, but never in my wildest dreams did I think it would be used to hoist him by his own petard. How’s that for irony? When they closed the door to my cell at Walla Walla that first day, I thought that was where I’d spend the rest of my life.”
He paused, taking her in with his eyes in the way that made her sick. “And then you came to talk to me.” He started to laugh. “And the more we talked, the more I realized they’d never told you what they’d done. You told me about the jewelry, how you knew your sister hadn’t been wearing it that day, how she couldn’t wear it, but that no one would listen to you. I got to admit, you got my hopes up, but then I realized that, with her body at the bottom of a lake, I’d screwed myself. So I settled in to do my time. I guess fate took over.”
Tracy slid down the concrete wall, her legs suddenly weak. She knew who’d made the decision not to tell her. It was what DeAngelo Finn wouldn’t say, that day she had gone to visit him. It was what Roy Calloway had nearly said outside the veterinary clinic. It had been her father’s decision, and he’d made them swear to never tell her. Tracy was the one Finn was referring to, the one still left, the one her father had loved so very much.
Her father and Calloway had figured out that it was Tracy that House had wanted, that it should have been Tracy shackled in this hellhole, abused by the psychopath standing before her. James Crosswhite had forbidden them to say a word, knowing that the guilt would have been too much for Tracy to bear, that it would have killed her.
“I’m afraid I have to leave now.” House stood. “I have unfinished business.”
“You’re never going to get away with this, House. Calloway knows. He’s going to come for you.”
House smiled. “That’s what I’m counting on.”